TROY, N.Y. — Watson, the supercomputer famous for beating the world’s best human
Jeopardy! champions, is going to college.

IBM announced last week that it will provide a Watson system to Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, the first time the computer is being sent to a university. Just like the flesh-and-blood
students who will work on it, Watson is leaving home to sharpen its skills. Course work will
include English and math.

“It’s a big step for us,” said Michael Henesey, IBM’s vice president of business development. “
We consider it absolutely strategic technology for IBM in the future. And we want to evolve it, of
course, thoughtfully, but also in collaboration with the best and brightest in academia.”

Watson is a cognitive system that can process huge amounts of data, including natural language.
To beat
Jeopardy! champions in 2011, it was fed the contents of encyclopedias, dictionaries,
books, news dispatches and movie scripts. For its medical work, it takes in medical textbooks and
journals. After it takes in data, Watson can provide information such as a correct
Jeopardy! response, a medical diagnosis or an estimate of financial risk.

IBM, which provided a grant to Rensselaer to operate Watson for three years, sees it as a way to
help it boost the computer’s cognitive capabilities.

Artificial intelligence researchers at Rensselaer want to do things such as improve Watson’s
mathematical ability and help it quickly figure out the meaning of new or made-up words. They want
to improve its ability to handle the torrent of images, videos and emails on the Web, the sort of
unstructured information that is fueling an overwhelming data boom.

For Selmer Bringsjord, who heads Rensselaer’s Department of Cognitive Science, getting a crack
at Watson is like a car aficionado being tossed the keys to a Lamborghini. Bringsjord said he and
his graduate students potentially could focus on providing Watson with a deeper understanding of
the structure of sentences and how dialogues unfold.

“If I can make a tiny, tiny contribution in that direction, given how historic the system is, I’d
be very happy, and I think my graduate students would be as well,” Bringsjord said.

The original Watson remains at IBM’s Research Headquarters in Westchester County, N.Y., about
100 miles south of the school. Rensselaer has hardware fully dedicated to running the system’s
software at its supercomputing center in the Rensselaer Tech Park near the school. Rensselaer’s
version of Watson has 15 terabytes of memory, enough to store a gigantic library. It will allow 20
users to access the system at once.

IBM has worked collaboratively with other outside institutions on Watson, such as Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, New York-based Citigroup Inc. and the Cleveland Clinic.
But this is the first time hardware fully dedicated to running the Watson software is being
installed at a college.

Officials with IBM and Rensselaer say Watson’s college tenure also will prepare students for
jobs in cognitive science and “big data,” a field where demand is quickly outpacing supply.